I emailed BlueVia last week regarding availability in Australia for their new Arduino GSM shield, the reply I received indicated that it was only available in certain international locations: http://bluevia.com/en/page/tech.arduino.service and when it becomes available the shield can be purchased through the Arduino Store.

I was given no indication of eta but I was told that using a SIM card other than the one supplied from BlueVia would not be supported.

Has anyone had problems with connecting to the GSM network? I have a deal with one of our national operators. When the SIM card is inserted to a normal cell phone, it connects without any problems. But, when inserted to Geetech SIM900 GPRS shield, it has difficulties to register to the net.

On my desk it connects only occasionally, in our kitchen it connects better. Seems, that the shield needs really strong signal to register to the net. Last week in another city it connected every time without problems. What can I do to get it registered more reliably? This leads to antenna related issues, but everything seems to be ok. It has a removable antenna and from the antenna jack a thin lead goes to the board to another really small connector.

The Telefonica / Arduino GSM Shield is now available: http://store.arduino.cc/ww/index.php?main_page=product_info&cPath=11_5&products_id=244

Unfortunately a bit more expensive than I expected. I heard in an interview that the price would be well below already sold GSM modules, but it is rather more expensive than existing shields. I am also a bit disappointed that the power consumption seems to have the level of already existing shields.

Is the GSM lib included in the Arduino IDE 1.0.4 only for the new Arduino shield or is it also usable with the GBoard?? http://imall.iteadstudio.com/im120411004.html

Btw there is a service similar to Telefonica's from Cumulocity, her is the GBoard bundled with a Deutsche Telekom SIM http://www.heise.de/hardware-hacks/meldung/Arduino-funkt-in-die-Cloud-1810096.html

My problem has been the use of serial data as the gsm shield uses SS for its own communication. If your trying to send data from another serial input (such as GPS) the answer appears to be complicated to say the least...